Li­breOf­fice 6.0 ar­rives!

With a bunch of tweaks, open source pro­duc­tiv­ity suite Li­breOf­fice has reached ver­sion 6.0. The re­lease is nicely timed with the sev­enth an­niver­sary cel­e­bra­tions of Li­breOf­fice, a pop­u­lar al­ter­na­tive to Mi­crosoft Of­fice. Up­dates for Li­breOf­fice 6.0 are avail­able across Win­dows, Linux and macOS, with cloud aug­men­ta­tion to al­low users to work on the Web too.

The se­cu­rity fea­tures in­clude ex­per­i­men­tal sup­port of OpenPGP en­cryp­tion (sub­ject to com­pat­i­ble com­pan­ion soft­ware) and doc­u­ment clas­si­fi­ca­tion that al­lows mul­ti­ple poli­cies and sign­ing/mark­ing at a para­graph level. Ver­sion 6.0 of Li­breOf­fice of­fers gen­eral spell-check­ing im­prove­ments, which can speed up the work of writ­ers. In­stead of the man­ual han­dling of hun­dreds of cor­rect word forms of a new word in a lan­guage with rich mor­phol­ogy or com­pound­ing, the Hun­spell spell-checker will recog­nise the new user dic­tio­nary word with af­fixes or in com­pounds, too, based on a ‘Gram­mar By’ model word.

The cloud ver­sion has been tweaked to fur­ther match the desk­top edi­tion with cell sup­port in CALC raised to half a million, a ‘Save As’ fea­ture for em­bed­ded im­ages and a ‘Find and Re­place’ di­a­logue box. For those who want to go un­der the hood, the source code for Li­breOf­fice on­line is avail­able as a Docker im­age. You can also im­port files from QuarkEx­press.

For en­ter­prises though, The Doc­u­ment Foun­da­tion sug­gests that, “Li­breOf­fice 6.0 rep­re­sents the bleed­ing edge in term of fea­tures for open source of­fice suites, and as such, is tar­geted at tech­nol­ogy en­thu­si­asts, early adopters and power users.”

An im­proved Form menu has been added to Li­breOf­fice 6.0 for de­sign­ing forms, and there’s eas­ier ac­cess to spe­cial char­ac­ters – great for those of us that type ‘μ’ a lot. A ver­sion for An­droid is also in the works, sched­uled for a spring re­lease, which will, amongst other things, al­low users to add pho­tos from their phones di­rectly into projects.